Assessment of third-party logistics providers using a CRITIC–WASPAS approach with interval type-2 fuzzy sets

The assessment of Third-Party Logistics (3PL) provider becomes an important issue for enterprises trying to achieve operational efficiency and customer service improvement as well as capital expenditure and logistics costs reduction. It can be said that evaluation and selection of an appropriate 3PL provider is a kind of Multi-Criteria Decision-Making (MCDM) problem. Uncertainty is an unavoidable part of information in the decision-making process. Interval Type-2 Fuzzy Sets (IT2FSs) are very flexible to model the uncertainty of the MCDM problems. In this study, a new integrated approach based on the criteria Importance Through Inter-criteria Correlation (CRITIC) and Weighted Aggregated Sum Product assessment (WASPAS) methods is proposed to evaluate 3PL providers with IT2FSs. In the proposed approach, objective weights resulted from the CRITIC method are combined with subjective weights expressed by decision-makers (dms) to determine more realistic weights for criteria. A computational study is performed to illustrate the proposed approach and the applicability of it. In addition, a sensitivity analysis is carried out using different sets of criteria weights to demonstrate the stability of the proposed approach. The results show the stability of ranking results and prove the efficiency of the proposed approach to handle MCDM problems with IT2FSs.